One of the key motivations, shared by myself and Mike Croucher, for establishing an RSE group at the University of Sheffield was to provide a career path for RSEs. The RSE team has been working for some time with HR on establishing a generic job (role) description for G7 and G8 (lecturer level) RSEs which can be used for staff progression. I am please to announce that these are now published on our website. The job descriptions provide a template for the recruitment of RSEs across the whole university and are the job descriptions which members of the RSE team work from.

In conjunction with the release of these RSE job descriptions I am excited to announce that we are currently advertising an open-ended RSE position to join the RSE group. This is particularly important to me as the group director as it is the first new open-ended RSE post to be advertised which is not attached to any particular research project. 1 The significance of this is that this role demonstrates that the university is bought into the RSE vision and strategy which has been developed at Sheffield. A large number of people have contributed to developing this strategy and I am extremely pleased to see it moving forward. The new position will be working within a group of RSEs which has grown significantly over the last two years (additional recruitment is planned shortly). Myself and the group look forward to welcoming a new candidate into the team.